Director Tsirbas benefitted greatly from his vfx experience as a generalist, learning the craft of modeling, lighting, animation and texturing. Watch this break down sequence to see more.

BD: What about the notion of embracing more thought provoking themes about war and the environment yet still remaining kid-friendly?

AT: That came from two places: I initially conceived Terra as live action with the aliens in CGI. But there was absolutely no way when we got into business with our producing partners that it could be done that way… The next idea was to do it all-animated. I personally see animation as an art form on the same level as live action. It doesn't have to be for children. We have a long way to go to broaden the scope. And I think that CGI reinvigorated the idea that animation could be more than children's entertainment because it could be very realistic and have subtlety and nuance. I love traditional animation, but I think CGI is making the art form limitless.

When making Terra, I thought I'd make a very dramatic film. But as we were making it, I ran into a lot of hurdles along the way, so that it couldn't be straight, dramatic, adult fare. It really needed to appeal to kids. So I brought in a screenwriter who had experience doing Disney films [Evan Spiliotopoulos] and we younged it up and put humor in it. And for the longest time, we were struggling with that. We couldn't revolutionize the animated film overnight. But I still stuck to my guns and tried to keep things dramatic as well. In the end, which is really cool, is that it's being marketed as an action/science fiction film. I don't know if it's schizophrenic, but it has many different tones. As we were making it, we were struggling to figure out this film's audience. My belief is that kids are more sophisticated than most of us obviously think -- and our test screenings proved that. Kids have no problem with the moral ambiguity that's presented early on and they have no problem watching a film that presents you with an impossible choice and introduces you to a new choice. The barriers are more their parents, who are concerned whether they would like this film. It was never conceived as an action film, but it was renamed Battle for Terra to better help market it. Test audiences have been satisfied, so we'll see how it does.

Character animation was done in Maya while the rest was done in LightWave 3D to take particular advantage of the fast and efficient renderer.

BD: Your experience as a digital effects artist must've been invaluable, having worked on Titanic and Deep Space Nine.

AT: If you look at Terra, there's a live-action aesthetic with the camera and realism of the lighting. That was done intentionally because of the tone being a little more serious. My background in visual effects was very helpful because I worked as a digital artist often as a generalist, so I needed to know modeling, lighting, animation, texturing. And that allowed me to initially make short films and to be able to do all the work myself. I wouldn't recommend it to do that way, but it was the only way to get my short films done. As a digital artist, I was able to do so much with the quality to get some attention and notoriety. And definitely the digital art experience helped on Terra because I didn't have a very large crew and I was one of the artists. With such limited resources, it was my responsibility to create an animatic that was the first pass of the movie the first year to get financing for the rest. To do 80% of the modeling minus texturing, and then first pass edit, the lighting and camera, and I would take that into Final Cut and record all the voices and then edit it together. We hired some interns and a couple of artists to finish the animatic.

BD: And the character animation was kept pretty simple by necessity?

AT: Yes, I had to model all the characters in their final form prior to going into production because I had to bring in a rigger to rig everything, so everything had to be the final point count, so things are kept pretty simple. What's interesting about Terra is that it looks bigger than it actually is... Learning the craft of character animation was the biggest challenge. Because I didn't have a character animation supervisor, I worked directly with the animators and learned so much.

Bill Desowitz is senior editor of AWN and VFXWorld.